Tag: 1981

Wet Dream (Wet Dream Cousin)

Wet Dream (Wet Dream Cousin)

(Featured Image: “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” (“蛸と海女”), Hokusai, 1814.)

Of the three Vanity 6 songs originally recorded for the Hookers project in mid-1981, “Wet Dream” sets itself apart in a few key ways. First, unlike “Make-Up” and “Drive Me Wild,” it isn’t a hard proto-techno dance track, but a glistening synthpop confection in the “Private Joy” vein. And second, rather than Susan Moonsie, it features vocals by Denise Matthews–better known as the woman who put the “Vanity” in Vanity 6.

The singer on the original Hookers version of “Wet Dream” isn’t documented. Prince Vault assumes Jamie Shoop, which is as good a guess as any; it’s also possible that Prince simply laid down his own guide vocals, or cut the basic track as an instrumental. But whatever the specifics, he returned to the song in the spring of 1982 to add vocal overdubs by Vanity and Brenda Bennett. The results, like most Vanity vocal tracks, were mixed.

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Drive Me Wild

Drive Me Wild

(Featured Image: Susan and friend in the music video for “Drive Me Wild,” 1983; © Warner Bros.)

Much as he had with his first backing group, Prince wanted each member of Vanity 6 to have a well-defined persona; but where the band dynamic held at least a veneer of egalitarianism, his vision for the girl group was unfettered by matters of subjectivity or nuance. He thus drew their characters straight out of porno archetypes: Vanity, the sensitive harlot whose tough exterior masks a heart of gold; Brenda, the chain-smoking, no-nonsense madam figure; and Susan, the jailbait. Only 18 at the time of their debut, the group’s youngest member shaved off two more years in early interviews–another trick borrowed from Prince’s early career–while projecting an aura of fetishized, all-too-corruptible innocence.

At the core of this dirty-schoolgirl persona was “Drive Me Wild,” another of the handful of songs originally recorded for the proto-Vanity 6 Hookers project in 1981. The story goes that Susan had written the song herself, and recited the lyrics to Prince in a chance meeting at a Minneapolis nightclub (one, apparently, that served teenagers). “He was just standing there drinking orange juice and we started talking,” she told Jet magazine. “I told him that I wrote songs, then gave him a sample of my lyrics: ‘Ooh, look at me. I’m a Cadillac. I’m a brand new convertible child, I’ve never been driven. You’re the first. Come on baby; drive me wild’” (Jet 1983 60).

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Make-Up

Make-Up

(Featured Image: “Untitled (Make-Up),” Richard Prince, 1983.)

Even after recruiting Denise Matthews to be the group’s frontwoman, Prince still envisioned Vanity 6 as a girl group in the classic sense, with each member taking the lead on their respective songs. This gave him the opportunity to return to a pair of tracks originally recorded for the Hookers project in the summer of 1981, featuring Susan Moonsie on lead vocals. Though they date back to almost a year earlier than the rest of the album, “Make-Up” and “Drive Me Wild” sound cutting-edge. Like “All the Critics Love U in New York,” both songs seem to parallel the emerging sounds of Detroit techno–particularly “Make-Up,” with Susan’s deliberately cold, dispassionate vocals, a frenetic Linn LM-1 pattern, and a synth-bass line that resembles a computer processor clearing its throat.

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All the Critics Love U in New York

All the Critics Love U in New York

(Featured Image: With an old friend at the American Music Awards in Los Angeles, January 25, 1982; that’s Steve Fargnoli in the background. Photo stolen from Consequence of Sound.)

Prince’s Los Angeles sojourn in mid-January 1982 concluded with–and was most likely scheduled around–the ninth annual American Music Awards, held at the Shrine Auditorium on January 25. He attended as a guest, not a nominee: the “Soul/R&B” category, for which he would have been nominated, was led by old-guard artists like Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson–as well as his rival of two years prior, Rick James.

Since the conclusion of the Fire It Up tour in May 1980, Prince’s and James’ career fortunes had diverged in unpredictable ways. Prince, as we’ve seen, had become a critics’ darling, trading the commercial success of his second album for the underground credibility of Dirty Mind and Controversy. James, meanwhile, had faltered with 1980’s flaccid Garden of Love–the album he’d allegedly recorded with a synthesizer stolen from Prince–but bounced back with the following year’s Street Songs: a masterpiece that finally made good on his “punk-funk” credo while leapfrogging his one-time usurper on the charts. Prince may have won 1980’s “Battle of the Funk,” but at the AMAs it was beginning to look like he’d lost the war, with James nominated for three awards–Favorite Soul/R&B Male Artist, Favorite Soul/R&B Album (which he won), and Favorite Soul/R&B Single for “Give It To Me Baby”–plus a proxy Favorite Soul/R&B Female Artist nomination for his protégée, Teena Marie.

It’s thus intriguing that only a few days before the awards, on January 21, Prince recorded a song that both satirized and propped up his critics’ darling status, while also lightly mocking the cultural rivalry between L.A.–home of Sunset Sound, Warner Bros. Records, and the AMAs–and its older, snootier cousin to the East, New York City. The song, one of the highlights of his fifth album 1999, was called “All the Critics Love U in New York.”

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The Walk

The Walk

(Featured Image: The Time get ready to walk a hole in their Stacy Adams on the back cover of What Time is It?, 1982; L to R: Jesse Johnson, Morris Day, Monte Moir, Jimmy Jam, Jellybean Johnson, Terry Lewis. Photo by Allen Beaulieu, © Warner Bros.)

While work on the Time’s second album didn’t formally begin until January 1982, at least one track had an earlier genesis: according to Prince Vault, the original 2″ tape of “The Walk” stored in the Paisley Park Vault (and, now, at Iron Mountain in Los Angeles) was labeled with a date of July 1, 1981. This suggests Prince recorded something by that title–either an early version or the actual basic track–in his own home studio, a few weeks before the release of the Time’s first album on July 29.

And that makes a lot of sense, because “The Walk” is the track from What Time is It? that most resembles the style of its predecessor. It’s long: nine and a half minutes, to be exact, roughly halfway between the lengths of “Get It Up” and “Cool.” And, like both “Get It Up” and “The Stick,” it moves at a sauntering pace, driven by an unhurried “walking” bassline and singer Morris Day’s casual, half-spoken vocals. The titular “Walk”–a dance-craze homage in the tradition of “Let’s Rock”–references both the song’s moderate tempo and Prince’s early instructions to Morris while the pair were developing his stage presence: “Walk, put your hand in your pocket, and be cool,” as the frontman later summarized (Crandell 2015).

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